But didn’t? What would you have found very helpful when it came to managing your symptoms?
For me some things that were never analyzed in therapy that I had to analyze myself were
-Understanding all of my voices
-Understanding underlying feelings and reasons why I had the delusions I did
I also gained a lot of my coping skills from CBT. But they were directed at managing anxiety, so I had to sort of translate them to work for psychosis too. I wish I could have worked with a professional who specialized in CBT for psychosis (which exists) but it is a very rare specialization as hardly any people want to work with people with psychosis.
I’m very glad that I’ve never met a therapist who wanted to explore the “meaning” behind my psychoses. I’m certain that my hallucinations and delusions, and most others’ too, are not very meaningful in their content, and looking for such a meaning would only serve to deepen fixation on and involvement in delusional thinking. And it would be like trying to interpret dreams: You could find so many possible interpretations that it’s just a matter of choosing what you want to believe or being guided towards ideas that your therapist wants you to entertain. Sure, there are underlying reasons, but I don’t think there’s anything mysterious or deeply meaningful about them (if you’re afraid of spiders, you might hallucinate spiders, if you’re afraid of being controlled, your delusions might focus on that, and if you are under stress, your psychosis will deepen).
I wish my therapy early on had focused more on specific techniques and specific behaviors. A lot of it was too general for me. And exploring my childhood experiences probably didn’t help me much. Maybe somewhat, but not much. I also wish I had spent more time and energy actually following up on what I worked on in therapy. Then I could have learned good coping mechanisms better and earlier than I did.
For me understanding that stuff like my low self esteem was leading to delusions of grandeur was helpful because it made those delusions less real to me and helped me recognize future delusions because I could say “I believe this but it’s because I am dealing with the same feelings I did before” so our experiences are different I suppose. What techniques and behaviors are you referring to?
More CBT, MBT and Anxiety coping and relaxation techniques like deep breathing and mindfulness, systematic desensitization and more motivational interviews. Those are the techniques I can think of right off the bat. Motivational interviews have been very helpful to me and I wish I could have received them more, better and earlier.
The specific behaviors I wish I could have received more help with are too many to name, but they were/are mostly maladjustive interpersonal behaviors and lacking self-care behaviors.
I wish I had learned that negative feelings can actually be a positive thing, and you shouldn’t necessarily just try to make them go away. Maybe therapists have tried to get me to see this before, but I never understood. @rhubot was the one who finally got this lesson to stick in my head.
It was something like, “acknowledge that the feeling is happening. Observe what it does to your body. Remind yourself that you are not in any danger. It is just a feeling, and it will pass, like all feelings do. Just allow the feeling to happen.”
My therapist rarely talks to me about my voices and delusions. She usually talks about methods of combating voices, but never gets into the specifics of my voices. She also talks to me a lot about finding work (which is good).
